Research Areas:

• Aesthetics
• Philosophy of art
• Philosophy of culture
• Global theory of modern art
• Critical analysis of Central and Eastern Europe cultures
• Critical analysis of Chinese cultures

Biography:

Aleš Erjavec (1951) is a philosopher, aesthetician, theorist, and sociologist from Ljubljana. Between 1978 and 2017 (when he retired) he was a researcher in the Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Art. He is currently employed part-time the Institute for Philosophical Studies ZRS Koper.
He finished high school in Ljubljana, Slovenia and Bethesda, MD (USA). He studied geology, philosophy and sociology in the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His BA is in Philosophy and Sociology, awarded on June, 1975, M.A. in Philosophy (Aesthetics) awarded in 1979 and Ph.D. in Philosophy awarded in 1988, all by the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Between 1979 and 1988 he took part in seminars in l’Institut d'Esthétique (C. N. R. S.) in Paris under the direction of René Passereon.
Erjavec was a Professor of Aesthetics in the University of Ljubljana. Between 2002 and 2012 he was employed on a part-time basis in the Faculty for Humanities, University of Primorska, Koper (Slovenia). In Koper he was the Head of the Department of Cultural Studies and founder and Director of the international postgraduate program “Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture.” Between 2011 and 2015 he taught in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Since 2016 he teaches in Zhe Jiang University, Hangzhou and in Shanghai Normal University.
Aleš Erjavec was one of the founders of the Slovenian Society for Aesthetics and its first and then again recent president (1983-1999; 2005-2011). The society, which was founded in 1983, has been one of the more active non-government organizations in Slovenia, taking part in the political turmoil of the late eighties and early nineties, but retaining at the same time the necessary distance to political events too, also by supporting academic pluralism, and by aiding younger colleagues in their attempts to enter the global academic world.
Aleš Erjavec was also the President of the International Association for Aesthetics (1998-2001) and the chief organizer—either through the Slovenian Society for Aesthetics or the Institute of Philosophy—of approximately 30 academic conferences, among them the XIVth International Congress of Aesthetics (Ljubljana 1998), with 600 participants from 48 countries and the Third Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics (Portorož 2006).